


World In Ashes

by Twitchiest



Series: Apocalypse Girl [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Dark, F/M, Gen, Post-Apocalypse, Present Tense, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-17
Updated: 2015-08-17
Packaged: 2018-04-15 07:07:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4597422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Twitchiest/pseuds/Twitchiest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three months after the world burns, the electricity dies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	World In Ashes

_**One**_  
  
The month after the world burned, it is still burning. Radios scream emergency broadcasts. She makes use of a resistance bolt hole for a home and searches through the city for things she can use.  
  
She keeps her head down, and moves quietly. By the end of the first week, everyone has a gun. By the end of the second, they're forming groups. By the end of the third, they're claiming areas.  
  
She harms no one, speaks to no one, walks with her silent, guilty ghost behind her in the yellow-lit gloom of the night and takes what she wants.  
  
_**Two**_  
  
In the fourth week, a group of soldiers set up in the main square. Her lover counts more than two hundred. They move in one day, and the next they start ripping through the city, taking everything they can find, recruiting or killing everyone in their path.  
  
They do not find two people in a dark, cold hole.  
  
They stay for two weeks.  
  
The radios sing stories of a new government, a safe place, a haven. She listens. In the darkness her love cannot see her smile.  
  
If they rebuild themselves with ashes and dirt, they will fall to nothing.  
  
_**Three**_  
  
The soldiers clear out. The city sits empty and silent. In some places, water starts running brown. Her lover - though he has not touched her since he held a gun to her head, he is hers - haunts the quiet, pacing alone.  
  
The soldiers buried the dead.  
  
People are kind to the dead.  
  
There is little to be found in shops, and the warehouses have been locked and sprayed with a military logo. She picks the padlocks and they live like kings, for a while.  
  
Her lover makes noises about leaving. She stands in the streets and watches the lights flicker.  
  
_**Four**_  
  
Three months after the world burns, the electricity dies.  
  
Her eyes adjust to the darkness. It's a cleaner dark than the Pit. He takes longer.  
  
One day she says, "We will need a cart."  
  
He says, "We don't have a horse."  
  
"We'll find something," she says. "But we'll start with a car."  
  
It's the first conversation they've had in three months.  
  
He finds two square metal frames on wheels, connects them, uses sheets of metal to turn them into contained boxes with covers. They're slow, heavy, cumbersome, and take time to fill.  
  
She finds an unlocked taxi. It still starts.  
  
_**Five**_  
  
He wants to follow the soldier's trail, east. She likes the southern wind.  
  
They go south. The taxi guzzles petrol, but there's still plenty to be found. It is three days until they meet their first group of bandits. These bandits apologise. These bandits try to take their carts at gunpoint.  
  
She kills two with her knife. Her lover shoots only when she's in danger.  
  
She will have to break him of that.  
  
One, shot in the gut, she questions, and cuts his throat for mercy.  
  
The others that waylay them are warier of her smile. They fare no better.  
  
_**Six**_  
  
They abandon the taxi for a pair of affection-starved donkeys. Animals are slower, but they feed themselves, and grass grows thick and high.  
  
Her lover brushes the donkeys down every night whilst she watches and cleans her knife.  
  
"It doesn't matter where we go," he says. "We can't live on our own."  
  
Her knife has been sharpened twice since she left the Pit. She should do it again.  
  
"We need to find a group and stay with them," he says. "Maybe in the next town."  
  
She inspects the moonlight shining on steel. "I won't take any old gang," she says.  
  
_**Seven**_  
  
The next town has order, a police force, and people willing to trade food for the supplies they took off bandits.  
  
It has a pub. It has rumours.  
  
She nurses a glass of something bitter and strong and listens.  
  
That night, her lover kisses her, and stays with his arms tight around her. He has little fat left, and a scar ripped across the top of his arm.  
  
She never lets herself get as thin as she did in the Pit, but all her bulk is muscle. The townsfolk are warm, fat, and soft.  
  
They're not worthy enough of her.  
  
_**Eight**_  
  
She aims them south-east, and winter falls hard on the world.  
  
They spend a month in someone's prized country estate, clearing snow every day to let the donkeys feed on the lawn, keeping them in the garage over night, shoveling donkey shit out the garage door.  
  
She scouts, in the bitter chill of clear nights. She finds battlefields in desolate woodlands, bullets wounding trees. She finds a farm with a load of hay they can still use, and the donkeys feast. She finds jagged painted marks on the walls of sheds and the tops of cars.  
  
She loves the cold.  
  
_**Nine**_  
  
They turn south again, and travel through the snow for some twenty miles before another blizzard hits. This time they shelter in a country hotel, one with generators that still hum, and a sprinkler-fed indoor golf course.  
  
They find rotting bodies piled up in the basement. Her lover nails the door shut.  
  
There's food in the freezers. The cookers work. They eat their first hot meal in months, three course meals that would have cost her an entire month's wages, back when she worked for money.  
  
He takes a four hour bath. She sleeps. He's there when she wakes up.  
  
_**Ten**_  
  
A month later they've passed three connected communities, hidden in a wood from a group of twenty men with large guns, and every town and building they pass has a red and black symbol on it.  
  
Some of them are starting to look like letters. One has an arrow made out of a knife.  
  
The latest ghost town only had one shop, so they take cans from abandoned homes. It has a pack of mismatched dogs that avoid them, and hunt wild animals across the white.  
  
"Poor things," her lover says.  
  
"Poor bitch," echoes in her mind. She ignores it.  
  
_**Eleven**_  
  
There are not enough people and too few graves.  
  
She sits on a donkey's bank and thinks about the dead, pressed under the snow. She thinks about dead men in concrete hell. She counts hours, days, weeks, in the bitter cold, wrapped in layers of clothes, still, calm, steady.  
  
The world burned, and now it freezes.  
  
She can see words on the buildings, now. Her lover scans the road ahead for danger. In the short, biting days of midwinter, no one bothers them.  
  
A radio in a roadside cafe with broken windows is full of broadcast voices, speaking of hope.  
  
_**Twelve**_  
  
The weather warms, the snow melts, rivers flood. They curve around the edge of a city near-destroyed, at night, and bullet-fire rips the quiet apart.  
  
They travel back roads, side roads, because her lover doesn't want to kill. Down them they find communities worn by winter, people who watch out of windows and say little to strangers.  
  
They trade, and never let anyone see the full depth of their stock. Her lover doesn't protest, any more, when he sees the arrow-knife.  
  
He still has a little faith trapped inside him. He likes it when they're moving towards something, not away.  
  
_**Thirteen**_  
  
She is aware of the ambush long before he is.  
  
It's another thin, little wood road. She's sat on the edge of a cart, feet dangling between the donkeys. He's walking ahead of her. He needs new boots.  
  
She is still prison-wise, and hears the silence falling around them. He catches it when the only sound is the donkey's hooves on a gravel road, and stops.  
  
People in leather, with guns, and long knives, emerge from the trees. Six. Seven. Familiar faces that flicker in recognition.  
  
She pushes her hood back. "Did I keep you waiting long?" she says, and smiles.


End file.
